Matthew Parfitt And Dawn Skorczewski's Pursuing Happiness

The third chapter of the text Pursuing Happiness, edited by Matthew Parfitt and Dawn Skorczewski, presents information and quotes from Sigmund Freud, who was Austrian neurologist the created the modern day interpretation of psychology. After acquiring sources and learning about Freud I ask the question of, “Who was Sigmund Freud, what did he accomplish, and what was his effect on the field of psychology?”

Freud was born in 1856 to a large Jewish family living in Freiburg, Moravia. His family was economically limited, but that didn’t stop him from pursuing an intellectual education. In 1873 Freud went to the University of Vienna to become a medical student. In 1881 he received his doctorate and began working at the central hospital of Vienna.

He made three main and well known discoveries the unconscious mind, the libido, and the parts of the mind. Freud 's discoveries of the unconscious mind where made public in 1895 with the publication of Studien über Hysterie (Studies in Hysteria). Sigmund Freud believed that the unconscious mind held the key to understanding the mind and all its problems. He believed that the conscious mind hid feeling, thoughts, and memories from the conscious mind, and the unconscious mind was the only one able to access them. Sigmund was able to find the root cause of many psychological ailments by accessing the patient 's unconscious mind. A form of doing this was through the interpretation of dreams. Dreams are illogical in nature but are made up of memories, anxiety, and deep desires. Dreams, in Freud’s teaching, are a form of wish fulfillment for the unconscious mind. Another on or Freud’s theories the libido was defined as a sexual and erotic drive, similar to the drive for hunger. He believed that the libido was a part of our animalistic instinct that we are all born with. It hungers for pleasure but the pleasure it hungers for includes many thing and not all sexual. Freud believed that this libido changed gradually over the course of our lives. There are five stages to the development of the libido. The first is oral phase, around the age of birth to two infants experience pleasure from sucking on the mother 's breast. The second is the anal phase, which develops around the age of two to four where children gain pleasure from defecating. The third is the phallic phase, which develops around the age of four to seven which children gain pleasure from wetting the bed. The fourth stage is the latency period, which occurs at the age of seven to puberty where the child libido is suppressed and no pleasure is gained. The fifth and final stage is the Genital phase, which occurs after puberty where one